Sportisimo Brand Guidelines: A Mladá Boleslav Start, Penta Alumni and an Arrow

Two founders and a first shop.

Sportisimo is a Czech sports retailer founded at the turn of the millennium. Czech Wikipedia says it was set up in 2000 as a limited-liability company by two Czech businessmen of Vietnamese origin, Thai Ngoc Nguyen and Do Hong Son, each holding half. The Czech media and marketing site MediaGuru has dated the business to 1999 in several reports, so both years are given here.

The first shop opened in the autumn of 2001 in Mladá Boleslav, Czech Wikipedia says, and by the end of 2005 the chain had five branches. The step abroad came in 2008, with shops in the Slovak towns of Nitra and Poprad, and in the same year the company launched its first web shop, Sportisimo.cz. Romania followed in 2015, according to the same source.

Czech Wikipedia describes the range as most of the international sports brands alongside the company’s own licensed brands, aimed above all at families with children. In an interview with MediaGuru in September 2021, the company’s marketing director said Sportisimo wanted to be seen above all as a multisport and multibrand shop, even though shoppers also counted it among the country’s fashion web shops.

The business also moved its back office east. Czech Wikipedia records that in 2021–2022 the central warehouse was moved from Rudná, near Prague, to Hrušov in Ostrava, and MediaGuru reported in September 2021 that the company was moving its logistics base to the city.

An arrow and a brighter shop.

Sportisimo’s visual identity is easiest to follow through its stores. In October 2020 it opened a redesigned shop in the Palladium shopping centre in Prague, intended as the model for others, MediaGuru reported in November 2020. The fit-out was by the Czech firm Moris design. The aim, the company’s head of space management told the site, was a modern, bright store that customers could find their way around easily, which would still have the face of Sportisimo and a design that would last.

The new format added explanatory material to help customers choose on the spot and used digital screens for navigation and communication. Its linking element was an arrow, meant to set the brand apart from its competitors, according to the same report.

The same design went into a store in Sofia, opened in October 2020 as the chain entered Bulgaria, including online sales. In late August 2021 the format reached the Avion Shopping Park in Ostrava, the fourth store in the new design and the second in the Czech Republic, after a modernised store in Hungary opened in May 2021, MediaGuru reported on 6 September 2021. That report said the arrow stood for movement and dynamism.

The range widened at the same time. From September 2020 the web shop added 14 fashion labels, including Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and Levi’s, MediaGuru said. Besides its shops and web shops, the group also held exclusive distribution rights for brands including Umbro, O’Neill and Lotto, the site reported in 2020.

The brand’s communication is now being reworked. On 31 August 2026 MediaGuru reported that Sportisimo had chosen the agency Mark BBDO after a tender as its long-term creative partner, responsible for the strategic and creative direction of the brand and for a new communication platform; the concept had been tested with customers, according to the report.

Design and documentation.

European sporting-goods chains present themselves most visibly through the shop sign. A name, a logo and a set of colours have to work on a high-street fascia, a shopping-centre unit, a large out-of-town store and a website at once, and the companies show these marks on their own sites and in their store photographs. The colours and type in this guide are our own interpretation, not official specifications.

Store formats vary widely. SportScheck, the Munich chain, runs city-centre stores and an online shop, and in 2024 it opened a 2,000-square-metre Berlin store under a concept it calls “Future Retail,” FashionUnited reported. Sport 2000 separates a general multi-category shop from specialist running and team-sport formats that carry names of their own.

Ownership takes several forms, and it is worth stating plainly. Buying groups such as Sport 2000 and Intersport link independent shops that keep their own owners while sharing a name, buying terms and marketing; Germany’s competition authority named both groups as competitors when it reviewed SportScheck’s sale in 2020. Other chains belong to larger retail groups: SportScheck was owned by the Otto Group from 1991 and by Signa Retail from 2020, and since 2024 it has been part of Italy’s Cisalfa Sport. Own ranges sit beside outside brands, as with Witeblaze, the label Sport 2000 launched in 2023.

Corporate pages tell the founding story in each company’s own words, from Otto Scheck’s Munich clothing business of 1946 to the 36 French retailers who formed Sport 2000 in 1966. This guide sets out what can be checked about each chain — founders, owners, insolvencies and sales, with dates — and marks what rests only on the company’s own account.

Founders, Penta alumni and a holding company.

The ownership changed in 2016. Czech Wikipedia says that year Martin Kúšik, formerly of the investment group Penta, bought a large part of the company from Do Hong Son and raised his holding to around 80 percent by 2020, joined by his former Penta colleague Pavel Vajskebr. MediaGuru described Kúšik in January 2024 as a founding partner of Penta and a co-owner of the Sportisimo group since 2016, and in May 2020 it listed the owners as Kúšik, Thai Ngoc Nguyen, Do Hong Son and Vajskebr. According to Czech Wikipedia, the commercial register in 2022 showed SPORTISIMO s.r.o. owned by Sportisimo holding, s.r.o., which was held 80 percent by Liferoad a.s. and 20 percent by HSTN Europe s.r.o.

The group also became a brand owner. It bought Piccollo, the maker of the Czech outdoor clothing brand Loap and a supplier since 2001, according to Czech Wikipedia. On 14 May 2020 it took an 80 percent stake in Klimatex, a Czech maker of functional underwear and sportswear whose company was founded in 2007, with roots in a knitwear research institute of the 1970s, MediaGuru reported; part of Klimatex’s production was still in Bohemia, the report said.

Store counts are given here only with their dates. In May 2020 MediaGuru counted 183 shops, 105 of them in the Czech Republic and the rest in Slovakia, Romania, Hungary and Poland. In September 2021 the company told the site it had 193 shops, and Czech Wikipedia records the 200th, in Bohumín, at the end of 2021. As of January 2024, MediaGuru reported more than 230 stores in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, Bulgaria and Croatia, with localised web shops, a marketplace platform and more than 4,000 staff.

For a design guide, Sportisimo shows how a young chain can make its shops recognisable through one graphic device, an arrow, repeated across stores in several countries. Compare Hervis, another Central European sports chain, and Decathlon, the French sports retailer. For this guide we use an ink blue and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Sportisimo’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.